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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27135425">stoke the embers</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigiyakapepper/pseuds/nigiyakapepper'>nigiyakapepper</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hades (Video Game 2018)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon Compliant, Canon Temporary Character Death, Gen, Origin Story, Pre-Canon, Spoilers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 20:20:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,326</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27135425</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigiyakapepper/pseuds/nigiyakapepper</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <strong>[SPOILERS FOR THE MAIN QUEST ENDING &amp; ZAGREUS' BIRTH]</strong>
</p><p>.</p><p>.</p><p>.</p><p>Contrary to the tales Zagreus tells Orpheus of his Father searing his hands as he pulled him from his mother’s womb, it was Nyx’s hands that pulled him, expecting the same burning feet, but in her grasp the tiny feet were black and cold as coal.</p><p>(Or an imagining of how Nyx revived Zagreus.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Hades &amp; Nyx (Hades Video Game), Nyx &amp; Zagreus (Hades Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>151</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>stoke the embers</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Canon compliant stillbirth and related descriptions! Kindly treat lightly if these topics are sensitive to you. Game lore is followed, except in the case of the Fates who are named for convenience's sake.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Contrary to the tales Zagreus tells Orpheus of his Father searing his hands as he pulled him from his mother’s womb, it was Nyx’s hands that pulled him, expecting the same burning feet, but in her grasp the tiny feet were black and cold as coal.</p><p>It was a strange birth. Familiar to mortals but not for gods. Gods birthed other gods in all manners of ways – sprung from heads, their hands, eyes, hair and wills. Persephone had said her mother herself took her lover’s seed as lovers did and actualized her child in some god-like fashion. Her father, the mortal, found her on his bed, clean and swaddled, smelling of freshly tilled earth and crushed leaves rather than blood, salt, and caramel.</p><p>Persephone had chosen to carry Zagreus to term, as Nyx understood. Nine months or two and a half seasons, the House of Hades bore witness to her swelling belly with warring dread and joy. The Fates were willful as they were steadfast, or perhaps they knew as they always did – that the child born of the Lord of the Dead and the Goddess of Spring Growth would not live.</p><p>She had chosen the name Zagreus – rebirth, blood, life – and hoped he would want it, unlike her. She would not hold it against him if he didn’t, but now they wouldn’t know, Nyx thought as she watched Hades massive form curl around her, and Persephone, wracked with sweat and now with grief, hold their son and call his name again and again and again.</p><p>Time bent after that, as it does when one is immortal. For a long while, Persephone was despondent, and Hades, as he was inclined to, gave her space. Whether or not that was what was really needed, Nyx didn’t know. Hades did get space in return, a lot of it…until one day, one night, it was all there was left. A brief half-parchment of sorrowful goodbye and empty, empty space.</p><p>Hades had given Nyx the baby – to cast into the darkness or to sink into the blood of the River Styx was uncertain – but the imperative was there. He had not known what to do, nor did he want to see any more reminders of his family torn asunder. For once it was plain on his face that he wished things hadn’t turned out this way, but if only wishing could turn the tides.</p><p>Nyx beheld the boy and could not bring herself to stop. She bore his gentle weight, felt drawn to him like the sea to the moon, like his tiny body was gravity and her heart was tugged toward it. She stroked his ashen cheeks, nothing like the grey of her own kin, for the boy was more like his mother and ashen was not how it should be. She smoothed her hand over his head, feeling the soft down of hair similar in color to his father. She touched his small hands and cold feet and was struck.</p><p>Suddenly, by her own manner of grief, her own manner of desperation, her own determination. There was something wrong. This could not be. She had birthed some offspring of her own recently (with little thought at first as she had many), but Sleep and Death were as young as he was.</p><p>Nyx stalked to the realm of the Fates. The Moirai and her were never particularly close not for any particular reason. She was not foolish as to think they could be swayed, as her being their mother made little difference to them in their weaving of grand schemes.</p><p>“Show me his thread,” she said, demanded really, but the expanse of stars dampened the echoes.</p><p>The three of them turned to her like one eerie entity, dragging three pairs of eyes from the hard lines of her face to the cold bundle of baby in her arms, wrapped tightly in a black shawl in a vain effort to provide warmth. They exchanged looks, unreadable and no doubt cryptic, and while Nyx normally accepted this, her patience was wearing thin.</p><p>“There is no thread,” Clotho, the spinner, said, high, wide-eyed and piercing. Beside her, Atropos, the cutter, whose visage had morphed into an age more befitting of her role, idly snapped her shears in her wrinkled hands.</p><p>“Why.”</p><p>“Because the boy is not Fated to live,” said Lachesis, the weaver, slowly and gently, as if Nyx could not understand.</p><p>“Show me the threads of Hades and Persephone.”</p><p>Again, they made the performance of exchanging looks, but under Nyx’s stare, they conceded. The threads of Gods were different from mortals. More like chords, woven thick, strong, and luminous, sometimes threaded through with cotton whisps where they have interacted with mortals and other denizens of land, sky, and sea. Zeus’s, as majestic as it was, was rather messy to look at.</p><p>Hades’, black and iridescent in shades of jade and copper, and Persephone’s, a shimmering interweave of the colors of the changing seasons and sturdy hemp. It was not uncommon for Gods’ threads to spin themselves to life before subjecting themselves to the Fates, but as it were, no god with shades of mortal blood could be born in the Underworld.</p><p>“Then…” Nyx looked helplessly around the realm – an awe-inspiring, discordant, messy room of spider-like patterns, cut threads of felled life, all the flowers, feathers, fauna, jewels, thorn, oil, and dirt to weave into a life piled high up against metaphoric walls. She saw her own chord, since interwoven with variegated burning laurels upon Hades arrival into her domain. “Make him a thread.”</p><p>“That is impossible.” Clotho’s tone was hard.</p><p>“Use my thread to make him one.” Nyx’s tone was harder.</p><p>“Mother, we cannot unravel your thread to make him one,” said Lachesis. “The form is manifest, there is no way to tie a thread to him.” The middle Fate looked at her bundle with something akin to sympathy, and then it was gone.</p><p>Nyx was the Night. Sometimes she felt powerful, all-encompassing, sometimes she felt like she owned nothing at all and simply was – the stars, the vastness, the dark. Tying the string of Fate to a dead God was beyond her (or anyone for that matter.) She sought the help of those who came and went in the House of Hades, sought the advice of Hecate and willed her dominion into manifesting something outside of her jurisdiction.</p><p>She willed the black shawl to know their charge, the little baby wrapped tightly in their folds, to let the dry yet faint scent of his skin sink into the fibers. She journeyed to Hephaestus and borrowed his Fire. It was difficult, it made no sense, it hurt her. So she did it little by little, borrowing small amounts of fire to blow into the baby’s small cold feet, like lighting coal.</p><p>It caught, eventually, and burned steady, but weak. Carefully, she took a thread from the shawl and implored her daughters to make it work. The Fates accepted and wove the thread of Prince Zagreus, son of Hades and Persephone with three other fibers – blood, darkness, and life.</p><p>Nyx then brought the baby to Hades.</p><p>He looked at his son for a long long while, no doubt deciding many things, feeling many things, even if they didn’t show on his face. Decisions to keep him from the greedy gaze of Olympus, to protect Persephone by withholding any and all secrets, to hide the boy’s heritage and raise him as his heir, and many other difficult choices that all would come later, whatever the Fates decided to weave.</p><p>For now, Zagreus looked so small in Hades’ large hands, still in his night black bundle. Together, he and Nyx blow on the embers in his feet, gently, steadily, until they burn, suffusing warmth up and up and up, until Zagreus’s skin was no longer ashen, until his lungs expanded and the pain of first breath made him cry and cry and cry.</p>
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